The 12 films in the official competition traditionally and exclusively focused on newcomers, come from countries such as Iran, New Zealand, Great Britain, Norway, Italy, Tanzania, Bulgaria, USA, Spain, Poland or Romania. After two consecutive editions without a Romanian title in the competition, Quod Erat Demonstrandum, Andrei Gruzsniczki's black and white picture is competing for theTransilvania trophy.
„In making this year's selection for the official competition, I was extremely interested in the various forms of visual or narrative extremism tackled by the directors of the 12 films. It's not about shock or provocation for the sake of provocation, but about the ambition to tell an original story by defying convention and by going off the beaten track”, says artistic director Mihai Chirilov.
„How many fiction films – borderline documentaries – about albino Afro-Americans are there? How hard is it to make a two-character film, with time and space unity, without turning it into a theatre piece? Can you continue living while taking care of the dead? What does a blind woman see? What does a deaf-mute hear? How is a dog dreaming? What is the price of acknowledging one's own sexuality? How can one still address communism, when people today seem fed up with this topic? At what lengths are two people who lost their child willing to go, in order to recover their lost balance? And, last but not least, if time and space are like a Moebius strip, how would they look in a film?”, adds Chirilov.
The answers to all these questions are to be found, in this specific order, in the 12 titles: White Shadow (by Noaz Deshe), Stockholm (by Rodrigo Sorogoyen), Vis-à-vis (byNevio Marasović), Still Life (by Uberto Pasolini), Blind (by Eskil Vogt), La vos de los silenciados (by Maximón Monihan), Paat (by Amir Toodehroosta), Floating Skyscrapers (by Tomasz Wasilewski), Quod erat demonstrandum (by Andrei Gruzsniczki), Viktoria (by Maya Vitkova), Everything We Loved (by Max Currie) and Fish & Cat (by Shahram Mokri).
Everything We Loved (by Max Currie) will be presented at Cluj as a European premiere.
Quod erat demonstrandum, produced by ICON production, recipient of the Special Jury Prize in Rome and screened at the New Directors / New Films festival in New York, has as its starting point a mathematician's decision to publish his research, in 1984, in a specialized magazine of an American university, without the Party's approval. The film stars Sorin Leoveanu, Ofelia Popii and Florin Piersic Jr. Andrei Gruzsniczki also directed „The Other Irina” (2009).
Same as every year, the feature films selected in the official competition are accompanied by the films in the competitive section Shadows Shorts selected by Mihai Mitrică. The 12 short films, screened before the Competition films, come with dark, bloody or whimsical stories about werewolves (Luna), people eaten from the inside, literally (Bulimia Purpura), or alien civilization where the machines rebelled against their creators (R'ha). Shhh is a Guillermo del Toro tribute, Dedalo – an Alien style SF, Yardbird was selected at Cannes and Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel – the first ever video (in this case, of the band Behemoth) selected for Shadows Shorts.
The Shadows Shorts jury consists of Spanish writer/director Marc Carrete (Asmodexia), Gaz Bailey, the director of the Abertoir - Wales' International Horror Festival, and Costin Chioreanu, graphic artist, founder of the Twilight13Media studio, which made, among other things, the cover for the latest album of the metal band Arch Enemy.
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Transilvania International Film Festival (May 30 – June 8, 2014) is organized by Romanian Film Promotion and The Association for Film and Urban Culture, with the support of the Romanian CNC.
